I'm moving to a new AWS instance that has 2 120 gig ephemeral SSDs. I don't trust ephemeral storage enough to put my main data files on it so I will be using NAS drives for them. Currently I am planning on putting just tempdb on it. But I was also considering having a separate data file for some largely read-only non-clustered indexes.

My question is, if the ephemeral drives were lost would I be able to restore the database without some of the non-clustered indexes (which I could recreate from scripts after the restore).

I am planning on testing this scenario but am looking for some expert advice.

It is the only real choice in a virtualized cloud environment like AWS. I've seriously considered the local SSDs but don't like the risk since they are ephemeral. We've been running in AWS for about a year now and with provisioned IOPS we get pretty good performance from their EBS volumes (NAS). Can provision up to 2000 IOPS guaranteed.